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Wrap-up: Frontend meetup with Apollo and GraphQL

Ending 2016 with a big bang, we turned to Frontend for our last Developer Meetup of the year. Our Prague and Brno events once again drew packed houses as our developers talked server-side rendering in Apollo and GraphQL from a frontend perspective.

Michal Klacko and Pavel Polacek got the party started with a workshop on GraphQL. These two know GraphQL backwards and forwards, having already headlined similar workshops at this year’s React Conference and more recently at our Backend Developer Meetup last month.

“I think GraphQL is great for frontend developers, because it give them freedom to choose what data they will fetch from the server instead of having all data from REST API,” said Pavel. “Also the specific implementation of GraphQL — like Apollo Client — gives frontend tons of out-of-box features without the need to develop them, like caching data, store managing, real-time subscription, pagination and Optimistic UI.”

Pavel and Michal showcased many of these particular features in a sample app during their workshop.

Petr Hanak followed by demonstrating how to develop a webpack build on server and server-side rendering in Apollo. Very cool if we do say so ourselves.

“Web development is changing very fast and each day is getting more complex. We must push ourselves to stay up-to date with the latest technologies,” Petr explained. “Apollo is less than year old yet developers at Facebook as well as other big companies are already adapting its concepts.”

Missed all the fun? Don’t worry, we recorded the Prague meetup. Check it out below:

And we took a ton of pictures from Prague too. Tag yourself in the gallery here.